Sunday, September 18, 2016

The opening
track of Tapesongs – the second of this
pair of reissues of late 70s LPs by extended vocal techniques pioneer Joan La
Barbara – has a funny-peculiar title and a funny ha-ha back story. “Cathing” is the avant-garde equivalent of a
diss track in a rap feud or a grime MC’s send to a rival from another end in
East London. In 1977, La Barbara gave a
concert at a Dutch music festival. During the intermission, for reasons lost to
history, the audience heard a live radio interview with Cathy Berberian: in
many ways, La Barbara’s immediate precursor, an opera diva who incorporated sub-musical
sounds like gasps, coughs and laughs into her performance. In the interview, however, Berberian
distanced herself from the new school of vocal explorers, dismissing their work
as at best “research” and at worst the exhibitionism of “freaks.” The project
of pushing the voice to new outer limits had reached “an impasse, a kind of
stop”, Berberian opined, adding that no sensible composer would write for “one
of those singers” because the resulting work would be too tailored to their
inimitable quirks.

Incensed, La
Barbara channeled her umbrage into a compelling composition. “Cathing” takes
“samples” from the offending interview, subjects them to harsh electronic
treatment, and weaves around these fragments of butchered Berberian a bravura
showcase of exactly the kind of vocal acrobatics demeaned by the older singer. There’s something like five or six layers of
La Barbara vocalizing in play here: palate-clicking tut-tuts that Berberian
scholar Kristin Norderval suggests sound
like La Barbara taking Berberian to task; quizzical descents that similarly suggest bemused disagreement; a free jazz-like
squawk; a deep didgeridoo-like rumble;
holy drones like a hovering Estonian choir; a sort of revolving creak. As for
the sporadic bursts of distorted Berberian, these sound like they’ve been suspended
in solution until spiky crystals have formed around them. A take-down that
eclipses a once-admired ancestor on her own terrain, “Cathing” shows how in all
the arts competitiveness and generational struggle coexist with the most
dispassionately high-minded impulses.
Adding an eerie edge to the kill-the-mother subtext is the fact that
“Berberian” and “Barbara” are so close phonetically.

If you ignore the invisible
“mere” between the lines of Berberian’s comment, her description of extended
vocal techniques as “research” fits 1976’s Voice is the Original
Instrument rather
accurately. Take “Voice Piece: One-Note Internal Resonance
Investigation”: as the title suggests, this is a testing of the sounding
capacities of cavities within the human torso, neck and head. As La Barbara
emits nasal chimes, throaty croaks and feedback-like hisses, it’s like she
playing piano exercises or creating the equivalent of a demonstration disc for
a new synthesizer. Influenced by the circular breathing techniques of
jazz horn players, “Circular Song” is a test in a different sense: a feat of
flexed strength. The lung power required for any one of La Barbara’s plunging
lunges of inhaled and exhaled breath here would mostly likely cause a civilian such
as you or me to faint on the spot. A lattice of ascending and descending moans,
the overall effect resembles the criss-crossing contrails of fighter jets at an
air show.

Probably the
most compelling of Voice’s three
live-recorded pieces, “Vocal Extensions” is the only one subjected to technological
tampering: what sounds like reverb and panning were added in real-time. From echo
creating a fanning effect akin to a peacock’s feathers to a cracked-glass sound
caused by a vibrato gargle at the back of the throat, “Extensions” often makes
you forget that a human being is the shaping source of these sounds. But at
other moments La Barbara’s voice takes on the insistent quality of emotive
language, as though you’re eavesdropping a muffled argument heard through a wall:
tones of indignation, accusation, anxiety,
are discernible, if indecipherable in their details. Then the performance
devolves back into near-abstract sounds that evoke only the labour of their own
creation.

Released in
1978, Tapesongs – as its title
suggests – builds on the bionic enhancements of “Vocal Extensions”. Primal voice-sounds and late 20th
Century technology converge most audibly on “Cathing” and “Thunder,” where the
electronically processed zig-zagging whispers and twitters sometimes recall Trevor Wishart’s Red Bird. The roll and tumble of two tympani players forms a
rhythm-jungle through which La Barbara darts like a parakeet on fire. “Thunder” takes up the whole of the Tapesongs’s second side and while
exciting, there doesn’t appear to be much reason for it being 23 minutes long,
as opposed to, say, nine. Composed for La Barbara by John Cage, “Solo For Voice
45 (From Songbooks)” is the closest thing on either of these albums to recital.
For the first time, the listener consciously registers that La Barbara is a
soprano: her squiggles, telegraphic
dots, flourishes and glyphs suggest the dainty but frantic brush strokes of a
calligrapher faced with an insurmountable deadline.

Although
composers such as Cage wrote pieces for her or have recruited her gifts for the
realization of particular projects, for the most part La Barbara is a
composer-performer. More than that – as the debut album’s title proclaims - she
is a composer-performer-instrument.
In interviews La Barbara has compared herself (and singers generally) to
athletes: “vocal cords are muscles” and singers “live” inside their own
instrument, so should keep them in good shape.

Her work is
founded on the disciplined production of sounds that often connote the body at
its most disordered. This is perhaps where Berberian’s disparaging comment
about the freakishness of extended vocal performers originates: the sense that
this work exists on the outskirts of the respectable and civilized. La Barbara herself has spoken of “a kind of
singing that is impolite in a way, and very, very visceral.” The basic grammar
of her compositions – especially on these early works – are sounds associated
with loss of composure: the preverbal, sometimes involuntary, noises of exertion,
pain, ecstasy, distress. Retching, panting, gasps, sobs, sighs, moans, shivers,
dry heaves...

At times she’ll recall the
shamans of the Venezuelan Amazon, tripped out on DMT, strings of snot hanging
from their chins. And La Barbara has talked of picking up tricks from
recordings of Balinese monkey chant and Inuit Eskimo women, with their “vocal
games” and breath-pulse rhythms.

La Barbara
builds sophisticated conceptual structures out of the raw sounds of embodied
existence at its most rudely insistent and intense: the labour of birth, a
newborn’s cries, the wordless lulling of a mother, death-rattle croaks, the
ululations of mourning widows. Sounds
that are less expressive than simply expulsive: the pulmonary pushing of air from
the body to relieve incommunicable sensations. Patriarchy associates these sort of threshold
regions of life with a fearsome female power. This may be why
extended-vocal-technique is something of a queendom, from the precursor
Berberian, through the friend Meredith Monk, to contemporaries like Diamanda
Galas and Yoko Ono, to more recent figures like Maja Ratkje.

Yet in a
larger sense, an abject underside to vocal production is immanent in all
singing, no matter how trained or tidy or tame it seems. Voice is the hinge between the physical and
the mental, the concrete and the conceptual. Voice is where the moist interior
of the body – air pushed in vibrational friction through flesh-lined passages
and chambers – sublimes itself into
the abstract mathematical perfection of music.
Indeed it is the most strenuously achieved vocal music – choral singing,
opera, Tuvan throat singing, and so forth – that most etherealizes itself,
creating a disincarnate grace traditionally
associated with Heaven or the celestial beyond, with angels, the afterlife, and the supernatural.

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Some of La Barbara’s work touches on this
reversibility of the physical and the spiritual, the corporeal and the cosmic: from
the 1970s piece “October Music: Star Showers and Extraterrestials” to 1990’s
solo opera Events in The Elsewhere (inspired
by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, whose life and work capture the tragedy of
man’s questing soul caged in a prison of frail flesh). But then the word “spiritual” itself comes
from spiritus, the Latin word for
breath.

Listening to
La Barbara on these crucial reissues, there’s often a sense of shifting scale –
inner and outer, micro and macro, are evoked at different moments, or
simultaneously. Sometimes her voice suggests the pre-social – the querulous or
agitated sounds of a small child or animal. Sometimes she operates at human
scale, her voice taking on an almost theatrical quality, albeit wordless: you half-hear the sounds of old men jabbering
in Yiddish or some East European tongue, the low menacing talk of Mafiosi,
gouty and portentous grandees from the House of Lords. At other times, there’s what Gilles Deleuze
& Felix Guattari would term a “becoming-machine” effect, her vocal
productions suggestive of industrial processes of smelting, sanding, glazing,
the hiss of steam from a cracked boiler. At the largest and most disorienting
scale, there is a becoming-geologic or a becoming-cosmic: subterranean rivers (La Barbara spelunking
through the deep inner caverns of her body), the friction of continental
plates, bubbling magma, solar winds, sunspots.

At such
moment of “intimate immensity” - a
phrase of Gaston Bachelard’s borrowed for the title of a work, in which La
Barbara performed as “She”, composed by her partner Morton Subotnik - her voice is less the original instrument
than an originating instrument. At her utmost and outermost. La Barbara sings
like a mythological deity breathing the world into existence.

Friday, September 2, 2016

I'm sitting on the Astroturf lawn of the Grove, a
"retroscape" mall in Los Angeles, listening to Eighties covers band
The Copycats deliver immaculate counterfeits of bygone MTV hits. A 19th Century trolley car clanks by, passing
the Art Deco picture palace frontage that masks the state-of-art multiplex movie theater. It then heads towards to Farmer's Market, a vintage food court with clapboard
stalls, hand-painted signs and an original 1941 Clock Tower. Wandering over to the ornamental pond with
its animated fountain swishing and swiveling in balletic formation, I watch the
out-sized fish, so shiny they resemble mini-submarines made of porcelain. As the Copycats launch into a slick version
of "Billie Jean", I suddenly think: "this is like living inside a hypnagogic pop song."

Coined by The Wire's David Keenan, "hypnagogic
pop" is a term for a new generation of American lo-fi musicians who
channel the 1980s sounds of mainstream radio rock, New Wave MTV pop, the peppy synth-driven O/S/T's of Hollywood
blockbusters, and sedative New Age. Released as limited-edition cassette and
vinyl but reaching a larger audience through YouTube videos and blog- shares,
hypnagogic pop shimmers with motifs and textures that flashback to the slick,
expensively produced hits of artists like Hall & Oates, Alan Parsons
Project, and Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac. The
musical and conceptual pioneers of this movement, Ariel Pink and James Ferraro,
are both based in LA, as are other rising figures like Sun Araw, LA
Vampires, and Puro Instinct. Ferraro's
frequent collaborator Spencer Clark lives in another sun-baked Southern
California sprawl town, San Diego. Other
key hypnagogues like Matrix Metals and Rangers reside elsewhere but seem somehow
SoCal in spirit.

Hypnagogic is the term for a state between being awake and falling asleep, associated for some with hallucinations that
are hyper-real rather than surreal (as with the classic dreams of R.E.M. deep-sleep ). Life in L.A.--the title of
an Ariel Pink song, as it happens--does lend itself to a kind of "wide
asleep" trance, as your gaze falls under the sway of the sheer numbing
beauty of the landscape and the weather--the way a certain slant of late
afternoon light makes lawns glow with an
eerie incandescence. Even the less
attractive aspects of this town--those strip mall vistas of brand-name
blandness that seem so desolate in the non-Sun Belt zones of the United States--get
softened by the bright lit blue skies (another Pink song) and by the peculiar mingling
of utterly denatured built-up zones with
outright wilderness.

LA is a city where the Spectacle
(in the Situationist sense) and the Spectacular (in the geological sense: desert,
canyons) are freakily entwined. The Hollywood Sign is the cliché version
of this merger of entertainmentscape and landscape, motion pictures and the
motionless picturesque. But as a recently arrived resident, I've yet
to tire of the juxtaposition of, say, an In-and-Out Burger drive-thru against the
near-kitsch splendor of the San Gabriel mountains. "Collage reality" is how Spencer
Clark describes the effect, adding that his music is a byproduct of living in "a
zone that has beaches and mountains and hills as well as
skyscrapers... The weather is a big part of it too, you can
always be outside. A lot of my music I see as landscape music."

Hypnagogic is a 21st Century update of psychedelia. Like its Sixties antecedent, it comes from,
or looks to, the West Coast, but its primary focus is Los Angeles rather than
San Francisco.

Sixties anti-urbanism
(the dream of fleeing neon for unspoiled Nature) has been supplanted by an ambiguous
exaltation of suburbia. Hypnagogic
retains the original psychedelia's fixation on childhood but in a kind of
feedback loop this lost innocence has been contaminated by pop culture: MTV one-hit-wonders and Eighties kids cartoons
replace the Winnie Pooh and Alice In Wonderland references of Jefferson
Airplane.

The scrambling of pop time is a culture-wide phenomenon in
the West, but it feels unusually strong in L.A., where pop radio is dominated
by old music: classic rock, Eighties New Wave formats, eclectic stations like
Jack FM that mimic the iPod shuffle (but one owned by a fortysomething-or-older
who gave up on music around the time Kurt Cobain killed himself). Driving across the city, flicking between
stations (and effectively between pop periods), there's a visual analogue to
what you hear in the endless interplay of different eras of commercial signage
and shop front décor. In no other city
have I had such an overwhelming sense of the erosion of a cultural time-code,
that pulse that once synchronised the sectors of the contemporary scene
(fashion, design, music, etc) and constructed a sense of epoch.

Last year James Ferraro posted a YouTube video to promote
his albums Wild World and Feed Me, but which also served as preview of a full
length movie he's making. "A sneak
peak at Hell's hottest cable TV show", the excerpt concatenated low-budget
horror sequences (Ferraro as decomposing corpse, TV dinners that come alive)
with archival snippets of an animatronic-looking President Reagan and hand-held
footage of Hollywood street scenes: leather-booted
vamps from the Valley, businesses like Happy Nails and L.A. Tanning, gossip mags with "plastic surgery
shockers" stories on the cover. In
an email communiqué, Ferraro told me of future projects that would further extend
his activities beyond the sonic. The most striking is a "live webcam water
birth viewable online with interactive chat functions". Although the planned
location is Times Square, New York, the idea was actually inspired by
witnessing "a lady give birth in a Starbuck's at the Grove in Hollywood,
surrounded by smart phones and digital cameras. So you see this reality will
always be a part of my work."

This reality is hyper-reality. In what may be a deliberately
Eighties-retro gesture, Ferraro frequently sounds like he's channeling
Baudrillard, talking of wanting to be "Simulacra's paintbrush". Other Eighties totems spring to mind during
his patter. Cronenburg, when Ferraro talks of getting burned out on Hollywood, recharging
his batteries in more earth-toned, bohemian zones of LA like Eagle Rock, then
"jumping back into the movie screen."
Jeff Koons, for the overall aesthetic of kitsch sublime running through Ferraro's
work and the inscrutable ingenuousness with which Ferraro delivers his lines. For instance, he says he moved to LA to become
an action movie star, just like his heroes Van Damme and Stallone.

Less Eighties-bound but still part of this iconic cluster is
J.G. Ballard: Ferraro echoes the late novelist when he talks of movie-stars as
modern deities embodying qualities that human beings have admired since the
dawn of time. High Rise and Kingdom Come
spring to mind when you read the sleeve note description of "Headlines
(Access Hollywood)" from 2010's Last
American Hero. The song is about
people who get trapped in Costco (a bulk-buy, budget-price hypermarket) and
devolve into a mutant tribe whose children, "born within the
settlement", grow up with "no conception of a world
beyond".

Not that you can really derive this from the track, a frayed
instrumental that resembles the blues if its foundational figure wasn't Robert
Johnson but Harold Faltermeyer of "Axel F"/Beverly Hills Cop fame.
Elsewhere in Ferraro's most SoCal-themed releases--Wild World, On Air, and the
brand-new Nightdolls with Hairspray--he
explores a sound that draws on Eighties rock at its most Cheez Whiz artificial:
shrill, garish textures like you might at hear at a Guitar Center where some
Eddie Van Halen wannabe is trying out too many pedals at once.

Wild
World is punctuated by bursts of TV and radio: Michael Jackson
protesting about "ugly, malicious information" smearing his
name, a report on "wide-awake
liposuction", messages left by
members of the San Diego-based Heaven's Gate cult shortly before the mass
suicide. Like a modern-day Devo, Ferraro
never lets on whether he's reviling or reveling in the decadence and grotesquerie.
The cover of Last American Hero is a
glossy photograph of a Best Buy store, described in the sleevenotes as
"the MODERN Gomorrah temple". But in his communiqué Ferraro enthuses
about "the primal fantasies and fetishes, hedonistic urges, mouth watering narcissism and dreams
manifested into plastic surgery in our digital age Whole Foods candy
land".

Shopping malls, celebutainment, cosmetic surgery, a consumer
culture oriented around bi-polar rhythms of bulimic bingeing and anorexic/aerobic
purging: all this really took off in the Eighties. (And was taken to the
extreme in California--for Baudrillard, America's vanguard, a sort of
hyper-America). Perhaps the secret idea buried
inside hypnagogic pop is that the Eighties never ended. That we're still living
there, subject to that decade's endless end of History. Killing time as we wait
for something (seismic, subaltern) to rupture the dream.